


When I Am King

by x_los



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (1963)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-04-20
Updated: 2008-04-20
Packaged: 2017-11-17 12:12:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/551439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/x_los/pseuds/x_los
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor indulges in a bit of disaster tourism.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When I Am King

Title: When I Am King

Author: [](http://x-los.livejournal.com/profile)  
**x_los**     

Rating: NC-17

Pairing: Ten/WarChief!Master (historic Theta/Koschei, mentioned Ten/Simm!Master)

Summary: The Doctor indulges in a bit of disaster tourism.

Beta: [](http://marah-sarie.livejournal.com/profile)[**marah_sarie**](http://marah-sarie.livejournal.com/) : because sometimes that's just too many fingers.

A/N: edited request for [](http://best-enemies.livejournal.com/profile)[**best_enemies**](http://best-enemies.livejournal.com/)     [Anon Meme](http://community.livejournal.com/best_enemies/13938.html): In the end, How WarChief!Master Got His Groove Back is _not_ the title I went with. But it was a close call.

 

 

 

*

 

 

WHEN I AM KING

 

 

The Doctor fled the War Lord’s base, desperate to avoid the arrival of his own people. He returned just two minutes or several centuries after he’d escaped, depending on who one asked.

 

 

The Doctor hadn’t seen him the first time—he’d come in the wrong way, completely missed the body left for dead on the ground, half-dragged into a hallway. He’d assumed the other Time Lord had escaped in good time, and been glad of it. The Doctor hadn’t then thought the other man deserved the High Council’s version of justice, and maybe then he hadn’t.

 

 

The Doctor touched the Master’s skin and found it freezing cold. A restorative trance. The Master hadn’t told his employers anything about the Time Lord race. Well, the Doctor frowned, _employers_ was a strong word. They would have been his dupes, really, if he’d been given just a little more time. The Doctor had to admit that the Master had managed a remarkably thorough insinuation into their command structure. Still, he'd been careful. They couldn’t have known about his regenerative capacity. It had been intelligent of him, playing everything so close to the belt.

_  
_

 

But then he’d been more reserved in this incarnation than he would be in a few years time when he arrived on Earth with a fresh body, a renewed confidence that bled into a new smirk, brimming with sarcastic gregariousness, a spring in his step, his good humor restored. The Doctor in his second form had looked at this brisk, businesslike incarnation of the Master and mourned what exile had reduced Koschei to—a streamlined persona, all seriousness. The Doctor in his tenth form understood that he had been more to blame than exile for convincing the Master that the time had come to put away childish things.

 

 

 

 

The man who answered to the title War Chief hadn’t heard his name spoken in twenty years. When he’d been confronted with the Doctor he’d almost expected to answer to it. Almost yearned to own it. Almost lowered himself to _ask_ to be called the Master again. To be known, to be so addressed, most especially by this particular man, would have been a return to himself.

 

The Master was so buried in this scheme that he wondered if he hadn’t been co-opted by it. He sometimes thought he was losing whole components of his personality as they atrophied from disuse. But of course that was stupid—he knew what he was doing. Playing a long game wasn’t the same thing as becoming a pawn, not by a long shot.

 

 

The Master didn’t want the War Lord and his associates to know anything of his identity. There was wisdom, almost collaboration in the Doctor’s omission of his name from every conversation. But it ached, because ‘the Master’ was more than a name, it was his earned title, the thing he’d _chosen_ to define himself with. He’d announced as much to the world when the Council had granted him a declarative.

 

 

There was no memory as sharp and dear in the Master’s mind as the day of the entitlement ceremony, when the Doctor—but he’d been simply Theta, then—had looked on adoringly from the back row of chairs, mouthing with Koschei as he pronounced ‘the Master’ and in the utterance became it to the world.

 

Oh of _course_ Theta could whisper it with him in chorus, he’d told Theta what he’d chosen long before he’d enlightened the masses. What hadn’t he told Theta back then, when the world had seemed original and delightful, boned with promise and fleshed with opportunity?

 

 

Theta, who said ‘Master’ with such delight in his eyes and such reverence in his tone that night as the newly christened Time Lord thrust into him ecstatically. He had come as much from the sound of Theta naming him as the clench of his lover around him.

 

‘Master,’ Theta had whispered with spent glee in the soft, sweet period after they’d both finished, and the Master had choked out a long moan and been hard and needy once more, just from _that_.

 

 

But Theta, or rather the Doctor, had abandoned him not terribly long after that night. Their parting had been over a century ago, though it seemed a shorter span and a longer one at once. Things had stopped being so delightful after that. The promise inherent in the world seemed evasive, even illusory—if Theta of all people could break faith, then what _could_ he trust? The Master stopped laughing because there was no one to laugh with. To his surprise, it didn’t gall him that none of these pathetic aliens called him by his right name. They weren’t who he really wanted to hear say it anyway.

 

 

And the Doctor had abandoned him afresh now. Called his scheme to unite the universe under a hegemonic empire of peace and reason ‘disgusting.’ But the Doctor absolutely simpered with love for the things the Master had been working towards, and the Master was forced to conclude that the ‘disgusting’ element in all this had been him specifically. Such a realization would have visibly hurt the Master, if he’d allowed himself such ostentatious displays of emotion anymore.

 

 

 

 

 

The Doctor had been compelled to come assist the man masquerading as the War Chief by fine-honed instincts. He felt drawn to do it, as if his Time Line was pulling him further back in their circle, like a Mobius strip. What had happened needed to happen, and there were some things that simply weren’t in flux. But he might have indulged in a bit of disaster tourism regardless, just to see the Master again.

 

The Doctor brought the Master into his own TARDIS (disguised as just another SIDRAT—elegant simplicity, that) and he did what he could. He had no real right to attempt to telepathically assist the Master’s healing trance. He hadn’t been invited in. No matter how much he wanted to touch the other Time Lord’s mind, to know the succor of feeling that he wasn’t alone, and to offer it in return, he wasn’t going to violate the other man to achieve it.

 

 

So it was the outward things, the stupid little things that probably didn’t even help, that the Doctor was left with. He mopped the Master’s brow with a handkerchief and half-laughed with new sympathy for Jo, who’d had to do this when the Master had shot him, who must have been absolutely bewildered by the whole business. Even knowing the process as intimately as he did, the Doctor still felt useless.

 

He ran a hand down the side of the Master’s face, flicked a thumb through the bristle of the rubbish moustache the man seemed so damned determined to prove could work for him. The Master was fully out, and it couldn’t do any harm to acquaint himself with a version of his face he’d never had the opportunity to touch.

 

 

The Doctor began to worry when the Master’s healing trance mutated into a fever. The Master opened his eyes and recognized the Doctor, blearily unaware of what was going on around him but determined to speak. It was a mark of how disoriented the Master was that he didn’t comment on the Doctor’s different body or demand to know why he was being cared for.

 

 

“You,” a weak grip caught the Doctor’s wrist, “Didn’t it tempt you at all?”

 

 

“It didn’t. I didn’t lie to you,” the Doctor smoothed a hand through the Master’s hair, “I don’t want to rule anything but myself. I’m not that man.” He parted the thick combined locks, worried by the damp, sweat-curled proof of how high the Master’s temperature must be.

 

 

“Didn’t _I_ tempt you, then?” The Master tried to smile, but to the Doctor it seemed as if he was out of practice. The gesture looked odd, like a branch of a tree grafted clumsily onto something incompatible with visible bits of twine. The man’s eyes burned fever bright, and the mild tremors in his body made him arch his back a bit and moan, quite softly. His skin was pale and the apples of his cheeks were a high blood red.

 

 

The Doctor swallowed. “Don’t try to talk now.” It was sick to want him like _this,_ but when it came to the Master he didn’t seem to have much in the way of boundaries. The Master ran his tongue delicately over his dry lips, and the Doctor’s hand faltered over the compress and slipped to trace the line of a cheek bone, seemed to tumble down to the sharp jaw. The Doctor jerked away as if stunned when he realized exactly what he was contemplating.

 

 

He had come to get the Master to his TARDIS, and to say goodbye properly, with no one watching their every move. He wasn’t going to insert himself into his own Time Stream, or into anything else for that matter. The Master wouldn’t credit half-remembered fever dreams, but taking advantage of his errand of mercy to attempt any deeper connection would be wrong in the Master’s present state.

 

 

“Mm,” the Master drawled, managing, with some mysterious reserve of strength, to raise a provocative eyebrow, “That’s a yes, then. How very gratifying. I had been convinced you couldn’t once meet my eyes because your revulsion was too absolute.”

 

 

It was one thing to know how much he’d hurt the Master through acquaintance with the fallout. It was like being a paleontologist, determining that an ocean had once been here through observing the fossil record. It was a different thing altogether to drown in that ocean. Verbal admission of the Master’s torment hit the Doctor hard, falling as it did on top of the not inconsiderable burden of his guilt over the Master’s death.

 

 

“Master,” the Doctor began, but was interrupted by the man in question’s derisive snort.

 

 

“There! You _can_ still say it! Oh, bravo, Doctor,” The Master’s sentence fell off into a smothered cry. The muscles where the beam had caught him felt like they were clenching and unfurling in rapid beats. As he’d been shot rather thoroughly, that meant he hurt just about everywhere. The Doctor got the Master’s jacket off and rubbed down the length of his arms, his torso, in medical, soothing strokes. It was, rather appropriately, the touch of a doctor rather than that of a lover.

 

 

The Master, wild-eyed, was half terrified that this unaccustomed pain was a prelude to death. He choked out recriminations. There was no shame in pouring out his rage to a scrap of his own imagination.

 

 

“I would have given you so much. Even if you didn’t care for me, how could any fool reject being made a king? You needn’t have returned a tenth of my feeling—only let yourself be adored, mine, and you might have been elevated to _godhood!_ You would have been the only person in the universe to enjoy my trust. I would have _doted_ on you. Ridiculous, clumsy, clownish idiot. You think anyone will ever love you as well as I do? You think anyone else looks at you and sees all the glory I can see?”

 

 

“And you never give up on me,” the Doctor soothed him. The Doctor passed a cold cloth over him to get his temperature to lower. The Master needed something like that, slow and non-invasive and primitive, so his over-wrought body didn’t see it as an attack and shut down, forcing a regeneration that wasn’t due for a while yet.

 

 

The action distracted the Doctor from the uncomfortable consistency in the Master’s raving. The night before the rockets were due to launch and Martha Jones to die, there had been the Master, toying with the bars of his cage, whispering that everything began tomorrow, that the Doctor could have his body back on the day he was ready to properly install it in a throne. The Master was so certain that the day would come, on this side of the obliteration of the galaxy or the next.

 

 

The Master had nearly skipped out the door that night. He’d been whistling a jaunty, warped version of a melody the Doctor hadn’t recognized at a time. Only hours ago revelation had come with a pang as if he’d been the one hit by a bullet.

 

Lavender’s Blue. The Doctor’s mother had used to sing that to him as a child. He knew the words, and he wasn’t blind to their intent. Beneath new heights of madness and cruelty, the Master’s foundations were the same as ever they’d been.

 

The young version of the Master, who could still almost be called an idealist, who still thought his actions were motivated by a desire to do good—and maybe they were, in his way—babbled through the crest of the fever.

 

 

“Sometimes I was afraid one of them might see you for the wonder you really were and take you away from me. But I was blind. I needn’t have feared the other Time Lords. But _you, you_ could cut yourself free.”

 

 

The Master seized the Doctor with both frail hands and pulled him so their faces were close. Heat seemed the radiate off the Master. He was so vibrant, struggling in his illness. The Doctor bit down a perverse desire to run his hands, his tongue all over the super-hot flesh, to map the Master’s contours, to taste the determination to live of the man he so deeply mourned.

 

 

“You _ran_ from me,” the Master railed, “How did you survive out there, with pets instead of a true companion? How have you got by without me protecting you? You’re too delicate to do what needs done half the time, too merciful, unfocused. You need me, you know. We need each other. I’d be merciful, if I had you to remind me to be. I’d feel myself again, I’d be able to laugh.”

 

 

“I’m not so weak as that,” the Doctor chided softly, “I’m capable of terrible things. They always surprise me, and I regret them, and but I find I’m plenty focused, every time I need to be.”

 

 

The Master pulled the Doctor’s neck in, bringing his face infinitesimally closer to his own. “Prove it then. Do one more terrible thing.”

 

 

“What, now? Like this?” The Doctor was startled. It was a mark of their strange similarity that the Doctor wasn’t confused as to his meaning and didn’t feel any need to pretend innocence. “But I’ll hurt you! You’re sick to the point of—”

 

 

“It’s a fever,” the Master interrupted, succinct in his pain, “Nothing more. I ache. I don’t want to think about that. I want to think about how you feel in me—I’m not so deluded as to think I can manage anything else.” The Master attempted a smirk, and it lent him a surprising air of self-depricating humor.

 

 

“But you can’t even know what you’re saying—” the Doctor protested. It was a feeble effort. He wanted too badly to erase the memory of the Master’s burning body with the feel of him burning his way back to health and life under his hands to properly mean a ‘no.’ The Master’s skin flushing with pleasure under his touch would unknot the image of it blackening with the sterile heat of the pyre that ached in the Doctor’s mind. He wanted, and the Master wanted, and when had the bounds of what was normal and decent ever stopped either of them?

 

 

The Master tugged the Doctor’s hand from where it was worrying his gelled confusion of hair and settled it firmly on his naked chest, dragging it with trembling slowness down to his still-clothed cock.

 

“You’re my fever dream, aren’t you? Free of prurient interest, I want out of these sweat-soaked clothes. _With_ prurient interest, you could make that ludicrous sponge bath useful for something, as it's certainly not meeting any medical need.” The Doctor opened his mouth to object to this petty defamation of his nursing skills, but the Master concluded before he had to hear Theta’s well-remembered whinging. “And then you could shut up and fuck me. Rassilon. Even in my head you can’t resist disobedience.”

 

 

The Doctor’s unbuttoned the other man’s trousers and slid them off near reverently, because now that he’d committed to this it would be their last encounter, and his slow movement bore a strange, surreal weight. He used the rag to make the Master clean and comfortable, rolling his eyes at the mockingly swish sultry look the Master gave him as the wet cloth brought a damp glisten to his arms and thighs.

 

 

“That’s better,” the Master rasped when the Doctor leant back and gave the rag a nonverbal ‘there, done now’ flick away into a corner, “Now come here.”

 

 

The Doctor peeled awkwardly out of his clothes, and the Master sniggered lightly at his hurried sideways hopping motions. The Master caught his own mirth as he’d learned to in the past years, and then, with decision, laughed fully. He let his chest expand, and he allowed something withered in him a bit of water to drink.

 

The Doctor gave him an embarrassed grin. The Master smiled back. The Doctor settled back on the bed and gently arranged the other man.

 

 

The Doctor worried his lip, moving tentatively as he bent to lick a path down the Master’s chest. He traced down his inner thigh with a palm. The Master's habits from body to body were in some ways consistent, and the Doctor was unsurprised to find a tube of something they could use in its accustomed spot in the drawer of the bedside table. He shook his head at his partner's predictability, expression fond. The Master shrugged, absolutely unembarrassed, and then sucked in a harsh breath as the Doctor ran lube-slick fingers down, tracing the rim. The Doctor nudged two fingers a little ways in, just to the knuckles, going deeper and adding one more so slowly that the burden on the Master seemed to swell like a tide rather than jump in discernable increments.

 

It had been quite a long while since the Master had done this. It was good, no, it was _exquisite_ in a way that made the Master shift and stifle a gasp before he changed his mind and allowed himself a luxurious moan. The throaty fullness of it made the Doctor blush with the sweet swell of pride he got when he actually did feel a fraction as amazing as he was always informing everyone he was.

 

“Are you sure about this?” The Doctor hesitated, “I mean, it’ll hurt if we do much more than this, though. And we don’t have to. I could see to you without—”

 

 

“I said fuck me, not discuss it at length.” This Master was direct, and he bucked his hips up a bit just to watch the Doctor swallow hard when he did. It was well worth the strain in his muscles the action cost him.

 

 

“Right,” the Doctor propped the Master’s legs up and slid in as gently as he could manage. He gave a few restrained, controlled thrusts.

 

 

“Are you _trying_ to provoke me?” The Master sniped.

 

 

“ _Fine_ then,” the Doctor snapped his hips in deep. He tried not to feel a sick thrill at how wide the Master’s eyes went. Those glinting, taunting, admiring, illuminated eyes that seemed to always include him in on some private joke, with wicked glances that invited him to acknowledge the cleverness behind them.

 

He'd known he'd miss those eyes, in all their forms, with all their constancy, for the rest of his life even as they slipped closed on the bridge of the Valiant. He'd ached to kiss the shut lids. The Master had done so much to the people standing watch that such a gesture would have been a cruelty. He'd sobbed because he'd lost him then. He'd cried both for what the man had done and that even in the wake of the Master's death he couldn't grieve as he wanted. He couldn't touch the supple planes of the Master's face before they were taken from him, transformed by the strange rigidity of death. Couldn't teach his fingers the unaccustomed softness of that face finally at rest, couldn't take that to remember him by.

 

That face would be soft when the Master came, and sweet. If it wasn't the same face precisely, then it was still one of _his_. The Doctor would learn its every nuance with memory indelible. When he thought of the Master in centuries to come, he wouldn't first recall death, hate, shame, or even the terrible tableaux on the Valiant before an uncomprehending audience radiating confusion--how dare he even _cry?_ \-- but _this_. His last memory of the Master. Feverishly alive and happy, as only they could make each other. And that, he knew, would help make something unbearable a weight that he could carry.

 

The Doctor alternated plunges—which made the Master clench with pleased pain and his own cock just _twitch,_ buried to the hilt in him—with slow, shallow, teasing strokes that made the Master’s breath ratchet. At every glancing dip the Master squirmed impatiently, the light touch soothing his battered body and the Doctor’s conscience in one.

 

“Absolutely incredible, Master,” the Doctor sniped as he his breath hitched, and he too grew fever-hot and began to tremble, “I don’t think you can get off without annoying me. You simply must be insufferable.”

 

 

“Yes,” the Master grinned, unable to feel the pain, to think of anything but this, his eyes slipping closed in bliss, “I simply _must_.”

 

 

 

The Master woke up, clothed, clean but for some sweat left from what he presumed was the fever breaking. He was a bit sore all over but no worse for the wear, and to his surprise, he’d made the safety of his TARDIS. He was all together delighted with how capably he’d managed to escape, even in the altered state that accompanied entering a restorative trance.

 

 

He expressed his pleasure in the form of a bight babble of gleeful laughter, and was a little shocked by the sound. But over the course of the day he couldn’t seem to stop. The book he’d been perusing was a good deal funnier than he’d thought it was a few days before when he’d set it down to go deal with some minor crisis in the War Games. When he stopped to eat, it was with renewed pleasure—a place he’d never thought terribly remarkable when he visited it before, that he only went to because he’d stumbled upon it a few years ago and the waitstaff was blessedly disinterested, was suddenly home to a truly amazing selection of wines.

 

 

He saw a man at another table with atrocious checked trousers and smiled with rueful fondness—how strange it had been to see the Doctor again. And how stimulating. His half remembered fever dreams made him smirk with a kind of self-indulgent pleasure. Strange, the things one's mind came up with when allowed free reign. Apparently the Doctor still affected him as ever, somewhat comic new body aside. Well. There were worse things in the world than knowing what you wanted, he supposed.

 

 

How soon, he wondered was too soon to pay a social call? Best give it a relative year or so. Or more time than that, even, to seem less over-eager. But he would track the Doctor down, before too much longer. After all, the Doctor had spoiled his hard work and nearly forced him  to regenerate! Surely that merited a bit of threatening posturing and harassment.

 

Best move onto a new project, come to it. No more of this ludicrous business of subordinating himself to some petty War Lord or whatever the jumped up little idiots were calling themselves these days. He had too much self-respect to enter into any further schemes with people who wouldn’t properly acknowledge his superiority from the get go, no matter how well-developed the possibilities for commandeering their agendas were. And it wasn’t as if he didn’t have other irons in the fire. He wondered how the Nestene Consciousness was faring with its land disputes…

 

 

Walking back to his TARDIS, the Master caught himself whistling Lavender’s Blue. Smirking, he whistled it just a bit louder.


End file.
